Digital Marketing Blog

I’ve watched Pinterest convert online sales to hundreds of thousands of dollars and I’ve seen Instagram grow a customer base at an exponential rate. Getting to the optimized budget on just the right platform is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. However, there’s great data and insights to give you a good head start.

Running on a limited marketing budget means you have to be creative and find ways to maximize your efforts and ROI. Are you spending the right time and money in the right areas? We’re always looking for ways to leverage our spend, especially on social media when you’re working hard to test and observe the common denominator for success.

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are usually go-to's since they’ve been around the longest and have a ton of monthly users. But with many other social channels out there and usage increasing, where do you decide to spend the time and dollars to reach your customers and create the conversions you are looking for?

The next two mature and widely used channels that marketers look to expand to are either Instagram or Pinterest. Both visual platforms came about in 2010 and both are widely used by retail brands. So which is right for you?

General stats to keep in mind

Instagram

Number users: over 300 million

Age of users: 53% are 18-29, with 90% under 35

Gender of users: 49% female, 51% male

Pinterest

Number of users: over 100 million

Age of users: 34% are 18-29

Gender of users: 71% female, 29% male

Key Insights

Best to reach Millennials & Gen Xers. Instagram.

Best to reach females over 30: Pinterest.

Best for Engagement: Instagram. Instagram has 50 times the engagement rate of Facebook and 20 times that of Twitter’s.

Best for Storytelling & Personalization: Instagram. Users are looking for a more personalized experience and a more authentic experience with your brand.

Best for SEO, Traffic & Content curation: Pinterest. Since users can search for content more similar to a search engine and pins can link back to landing pages, Pinterest is great to amplify content marketing efforts.

While both platforms can be successful for many businesses, if you’re only ready to invest time and resources into one, be sure to understand your audience, their intent and which one they use more. Be sure you have the right analytics tracking in place to know which platform drives more audience to you and who converts best. Even if you choose both, the content and messaging for each can be pretty different for each and can depend on your business goals.

If you could use some extra insight into your target audience and what social strategy would work best for you and your resources, let’s chat and see how we can work together to grow your business.